Murray N. Rothbard, Economist And Free-Market Exponent, 68

By DAVID STOUT

Published: January 11, 1995

Murray N. Rothbard, an economist and social philosopher who fiercely defended individual freedom against government intervention, died on Saturday at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center in Manhattan. A resident of Manhattan, he was 68.

The cause was a heart attack, said a friend, Lew Rockwell.

Mr. Rothbard, who was born in New York City, received his Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University in 1956. From 1963 to 1985, he taught at New York Polytechnic Institute in Brooklyn.

Mr. Rothbard was the author of some two dozen books and many articles on economic theory. At the time of his death, he was a professor of economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and vice president of academic affairs at the Ludwig von Mises Institute at Auburn University in Alabama.

The Ludwig von Mises Institute is named for an Austrian economist who fled the Nazis and became Mr. Rothbard's mentor. Mr. Rockwell, who is the head of the institute, called Mr. Rothbard "the founder of right-wing anarchism."

Mr. Rothbard's admirers consider "Man, Economy and State," a 1962 book whose thesis is that the free market is the extension of the natural order, to be one of his most influential works. But Mr. Rothbard probably caused bigger stirs with his free-flowing, often acerbic observations.

In his view, for instance, Khrushchev and Eisenhower were on equal moral footing because the actions of both had caused many deaths. And, as he wrote in opinion pieces, the wage and price controls imposed by President Richard M. Nixon in 1971 signaled that "fascism came to America," and that American farmers were not noble tillers of the soil but "businessmen, no more and no less, no more noble or wicked than other entrepreneurs."